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In relation to Dominic Cummings’s analysis of political disillusion, the loss of trust in national politics is not a communications failure but a structural one. Power has grown too distant to remain legitimate.

The obvious next question is practical rather than philosophical.

What does local power actually look like?

Not in theory. In use.

Below are four areas where power can be moved to the locality in ways that are realistic, stabilising and suited to an economy that is no longer growing.

1. Control of everyday public spending

Local power begins with money that can actually be spent locally.

This does not mean new grants or competitive bidding exercises. It means allocating a fixed, visible budget to each locality, with discretion over priorities.

In a shrinking economy, the purpose is not optimisation or innovation. It is adaptation. Local people are better placed to decide whether limited funds are best used to keep a bus service running, support informal care, or maintain basic infrastructure.

For policymakers, the shift is simple but uncomfortable. Control moves from targets to trust. The centre audits outcomes, not decisions.

2. Health as a locality system

National funding and standards for health care remain essential. Delivery does not.

Health failure is experienced locally and personally. Appointments missed. Support absent. Care fragmented. These are problems of organisation, not ideology.

Local power means allowing locality-based health systems to integrate formal NHS services with informal care, volunteers, neighbours and charities. This is not a retreat from universality. It is a recognition that informal systems will carry more of the load as resources tighten.

In a contracting economy, pretending that everything can remain fully professionalised is unrealistic. Local integration is how standards are preserved when money is scarce.

3. Land use and shelter

Housing policy has largely failed because land-use decisions are taken far from their lived consequences.

Local power here means granting localities real authority over small-scale development, temporary structures, and low-cost shelter. This is not deregulation. It is re-scaling.

As the economy contracts, more people will live closer to the margin. Informal housing solutions will emerge whether policy allows them or not. The choice is between managed local adaptation or unmanaged national failure.

Policymakers should recognise that rigid national control of land use belongs to an era of growth that has ended.

4. Local economic resilience

National growth strategies assume expanding discretionary markets. Those markets are already shrinking.

Local power means enabling local food production, local energy, local repair and local exchange, not as lifestyle projects, but as resilience infrastructure.

This is where informal systems matter most. They are labour-intensive, low-capital and adaptive, exactly what a shrinking economy produces in abundance.

The role of policy is not to scale these systems up, but to stop obstructing them.

Why this matters now

Much current political analysis, including that of Cummings, recognises the collapse of trust but still assumes that recovery must be engineered from the centre.

That assumption is outdated.

In a contracting economy, legitimacy does not come from ambition. It comes from restraint. From visibility. From decisions made close enough to be understood and challenged.

Localism is not a political mood. It is a structural adjustment to a smaller, poorer and more constrained future.

The question for policymakers is no longer how to restore national control.

It is how much local control they are willing to release before reality forces it anyway.